The Schwartz Report

Tech & Tools Watch, April 25: Metalogix, LogMeIn, LSI

Now that Microsoft has reassured customers that it will continue to offer new releases of SharePoint for on-premise implementations, deployments of SharePoint 2013 are on the rise. That's the assessment of several experts including Metalogix CEO Steven Murphy. "They did an excellent job of clarifying their position that there are in fact two worlds -- on prem and in the cloud," Murphy said. They will be maintaining both and that's a huge clarification."

The uptick isn't off the charts, he acknowledged, but Metalogix says it's seeing increased demand for its migration and data protection tools for SharePoint. Metalogix this week debuted a new release of its Content Matrix migration tool. Murphy said the new Content Matrix 7 offers substantially improved performance, more fine-grained permissions that lets IT delegate certain functions to trusted business users for reorganization of content, handling bulk metadata and copy and move functions. It also supports the movement of SharePoint legacy code to SharePoint 2013 and provides Office 365 support for hybrid implementations.

LogMeIn Upgrades Join.me for Enterprise IT
The popular Join.me is best known as the free screen-sharing tool that many IT administrators use to troubleshoot remote PC users as well as for conducting online meetings. Now its parent company LogMeIn is offering an enterprise version. LogMeIn said the new enterprise edition will make it easier to manage, customize and deploy. The company claims Join.me is used by tens of millions of users with over 1 million first-time users. The enterprise release will support deployments of more than 25 users, support single sign-on via Active Directory Federation Services and Active Directory sync, will include advanced user policies and permission for both groups and individuals, better user access controls, 100 GB of managed online storage for sharing and recording meetings and Outlook integration. Join.me enterprise subscriptions will cost $19 per user per month.

Accelerator Cards from LSI Boost Windows Flash Array
As noted in my blog earlier in the week, Windows Storage Server 2012 R2 is optimized to improve performance thanks to its collaboration with Violin to ready the Windows Flash Array. This technology is ideal for improving SQL Server performance, proponents say.

For its part LSI yesterday said its LSI Nytro flash accelerator cards, which list for $3,495, further boost the performance of SQL Server 2014. Like Violin, LSI collaborated with Microsoft to accelerate SQL Server 2014 database transactions by improving I/O performance and thereby minimizing bottlenecks. In addition, the LSI Nytro flash cards reduce latency and boost throughput and reliability by taking advantage of the new SQL Server 2014 Buffer Pool Extension (BPE) capability, the company said. LSI says BPE functions as a level-two (L2) cache, with the main buffer pool functioning as a level-one (L1) cache. Microsoft in a statement said it tested the cards with SQL Server 2014 and endorsed LSI's claims.